France is an enormous country, something the bike race which bears its name, the Tour de France, all too readily shows. On Thursday morning, at the start of stage 18, the race was in the Alps, Moûtiers, to be specific, in the shadow of several huge mountains. Just a few hours later, the race finished in Bourg-en-Bresse, a town which feels like it’s on a different planet, surrounded on almost all sides by fields.
Stage 18 showed it at its largest, but it has always felt this big, possibly bigger in the past.
